More evil "Headism"

It's amazing how often we fall into the trap of hit-centric thinking. I gave a few examples of this in a previous post on the Dangers of  "Headism" (or should that be "Hitism"? Advice in the comments, pls), but more examples pop up each day.

Today's example is the mistake of seeing the world through Top 10, 100, and 500 lists. There's nothing wrong with ranking by popularity--after all, that's just another example of a "wisdom of crowds" filter--but all too often these lists lump together all sorts of niches, genres, sub-genres and categories into one unholy mess.

Case in point: the Feedster Top 500 blogs. It gives the top ten blogs (by incoming links) as:

1. Engadget
2. deviantART.com
3. Boing Boing
4. Albino Blacksheep
5. Daily Kos
6. The News is NowPublic.com
7. Fleshbot
8. Gizmodo
9. Michelle Malkin
10. PostSecret

Meanwhile Technorati has updated its Top100 list (also ranked by incoming links) and the top ten there are:

1. Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things
2. Daily Kos: State of the Nation
3. Drew Curtis' FARK.com
4. Gizmodo: The Gadgets Weblog
5. Instapundit.com
6. Engadget
7. PostSecret
8. Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall
9. Davenetics Politics Media Musings
10. dooce

What have we learned (other than that the methodology of counting incoming links is still a messy science)? Well, not much. There are a couple of gadget blogs in each list, two or three political blogs, some uncategorizeable subculture ones (BoingBoing, FARK), a personal blog (dooce) and a Flash developers site (Albino Blacksheep).

These lists are, in other words, a semi-random collection of totally disparate things.

To use an analogy, top-blog lists are akin to saying that the bestsellers in the supermarket today were:

1. DairyFresh 2% Vitamin D Milk
2. Hayseed Farms mixed grain Bread
3. Bananas, assorted bunches
4. Crunchios cereal, large size
5. DietWhoopsy, 12-pack, cans
6. and so on...

Which is pointless. Nobody cares if bananas outsell soft drinks. What they care about is which soft drink outsells which other soft drink. Lists only make sense in context, comparing like with like within a category.

Jeff Jarvis made this point nicely yesterday:

When Ad Age gives you lists of magazine revenue, it separates women’s and entertainment and business publications; in big-media, those pass as niches and they are far more valuable comparisons. When talking about newspapers, you don’t lump in metro papers with town papers with trade papers; it’s a meaningless lump.When somebody can tell me who the queen of the knitting bloggers is, then I’ll listen…. and so will knitting advertisers.

And now ClickZ is complaining, as well:

[The Feedster list] packs dubious value as an evaluation tool for media buyers, according to several agency executives who spoke with ClickZ News. That's because it doesn't rank blogs according to niche or topical focus, wherein lies their main appeal to marketers.

My take: this is another reminder that you have to treat niches as niches. When you look at a wildly diverse three-dimensional marketplace through a one-dimensional lens, you get nonsense. It's a list, but it's a list without meaning. What matters in the rankings within a genre (or subgenre), not across genres.

I've addressed this a bit in past, arguing for "fine-sliced aggregators" and proposing a methodology to look at the Long Tail as a collection of "minitails", each best addressed at the niche level.

Which brings us back to the music service examples that we've been talking about here. The problem with one-size-fits-all services is that they treat all music the same way, which suffers from lowest-common-denominator problems. The genre-specific ones, meanwhile, are optimized for one kind of music but don't integrate easily with the big world of music outside that genre. The question, and the big opportunity, is how to do both, while avoiding the apples-and-oranges problems that blog lists and other hit-centric ranking exercises fall into.

Comments

[bill]

A couple of points.
First, once upon a time, these aggregators were, themselves, somewhat of a niche. No more.

Second, because the lists are, to some extent, marketing for the aggregators themselves, and because an aggressive blogger could spam their way up the charts, all bets are off as to which blogs are really tops.

More than half of the daily visits counted at my site are spam. I use a script to strip them out of my logs so I can get realistic traffic information. There's money in spam and there's money in high traffic blogs. No longer do I take any traffic claims at face value.

Oh and, nice blog. I can't wait for the book

[kenjimori (Japanense)]

Agree.

Then, it is about the cost of categorizing or of filtering to make it meaningful.

[Talkendo]

It may or may not be directly germane but Mark Cuban posts about IceRocket.com's rating system (of course, this requires ACTUAL work on the part of the blog maintainer, for what that's worth.

Post here.

[-]

Boing Boing and Fark are not subculture, they're just "neta" (funny and interesting links).

[Brett Morgan]

There is a good reason that blogs are typically hard to segregate into categories, because blogs are not magazines.

Magazines learned a long time ago that they had to adhere to customer expectations, to become a "knitting magazine" or a "cooking magazine". Not conforming to that lead to lost sales.

But blogs aren't for sale. They are the collection of random brain farts of people. So, we wind up with everything from insightful reportage to off the cuff photo shoots of the cat on the same blog.

And we love it, because instead of getting some homogenised blend with no indivuality, we wind up with the twisting travelogue of another real individual.

The advertisers have to realise that they are dealing with a new reality. The branding these people are selling is themselves, not "knitting" or "cooking".

Quite what this has to do with the long tail, i'm not quite sure. And, that I suspect, is my point.